To be sure, there are many individuals of such moral stamina that they have come out of this experience personally the better, not the worse. There are people who would build into the fiber of their character any experience that earth could offer them. But if we are thinking of the moral stability and progress of mankind, surely there is nothing in the processes of war, as we have seen them, or the results of war, as they now lie about us, that would lead us to trust to them for help. War takes a splendid youth willing to serve the will of God in his generation before he falls on sleep and teaches him the skilful trick of twisting a bayonet into the abdomen of an enemy. War takes a loyal-spirited man who is not afraid of anything under heaven and teaches him to drop bombs on undefended towns, to kill perchance the baby suckled at her mother's breast. The father of one of our young men, back from France, finding that his son, like many others, would not talk, rebuked him for his silence. "Just one thing I will tell you," the son answered. "One night I was on patrol in No Man's Land, and suddenly I came face to face with a German about my own age. It was a question of his life or mine. We fought like wild beasts. When I came back that night I was covered from head to foot with the blood and brains of that German. We had nothing personally against each other. He did not want to kill me any more than I wanted to kill him. That is war. I did my duty in it, but for God's sake do not ask me to talk about it! I want to forget it." That _is_ war, and no more damning influence can be thrown around the characters of people in general or around the victims of military discipline and experience in particular than that supplied by war. How then could inconsistency be made more extreme than by saying that Christianity is concerned about the souls of men but is not concerned about international good-will and co-operation? After all, the approaches to the human problem from without in and from within out are not antithetical, but supplementary. This tunnel must be dug from both ends and until the Church thoroughly grasps that fact she will lead an incomplete and ineffectual life. IV